The Kolis, a community that has largely stayed with their traditional occupation of fishing, are descendants of the earliest-known inhabitants of the seven islands that became Bombay and then Mumbai. As a community, they and their lifestyle seems to be forgotten or ignored in the city’s rush to the hazy goal of ‘development.’ The Versova Koliwada (a ‘wada’ is a word for a village) along the eastern banks of the Malad Creek is a testimony to the neglect. The village of around 50,000 people is now classified a slum by the government.
The Malad creek was once where sweet water from the river met the salt waters of the Arabian Sea, forming an hospitable breeding ground for fish. But with Mumbai’s rivers having turned into little more than open gutters, what the Kolis are inundated with is garbage, mainly in the form of plastics. Bad all through the year, the flotsam gets worse in the monsoon, with mountainous heaps accumulating on the shore. This affects not just the environment — there are concerns about the mangrove forests in the area getting choked — but also affects their livelihoods.
A team of two Versova-based architects and urban planners, Jai and Ketaki Bhadgaonkar, who run an urban solutions think-tank called Bombay 61, have come up with a plan to both improve the collection of plastic waste in the area and to also possibly benefit the Kolis economically.
Building bridges
In their initial interactions with the Koli community in the area, Mr. Bhadgaonkar, says the team had to tackle the perception that since the enormous amount of waste coming into the creek was not theirs, it was the sole responsibility of the municipal body to deal with it. “What we tried to explain to them is that it had also become their problem and their responsibility to keep the area garbage free.” As urban planners and designers, Mr. Bhadgaonkar says, the team from Bombay 61 saw themselves only as catalysts in the process. “They are the ones who have the expertise in the water and we wanted to just tap into their ideas.”
Their efforts at building bridges with the community has paid off, and now their proposed intervention, a four-phase process, is taking shape. The first phase, Mr. Bhadgaonkar says, is to help build a ‘knowledge centre’ with the support of the already established Versova Co-operative society to create or facilitate new economic activities among the community. And the first step within that is to come up with an efficient system of collecting plastic.
Traditional skills
The Bombay 61 plan uses the Koli’s traditional net-weaving to make filter screens which are then tethered to the mangrove trees and suspended about two metres deep in the creek. The system collects floating garbage but ensures uninterrupted movement of fish. “About a month back, we installed nets in two locations along the creek, in Oshiwara river and the Mogra Nallah,” Ms. Bhadgaonkar says. “The purpose of the entire project in the first phase is to see where the waste is coming from and what is the quantity of the waste that is coming in.”
Within a week of installing the nets, there was enough garbage trapped in the screens — mostly footwear, plastic sacking, milk bags, plastic bags and plastic bottles — for Bombay 61 and the Koli representatives to do a proper analysis of the kind of plastic waste coming in and its potential for recycling; to help figure this out, they tied up with recycling units in Dharavi. The analysis revealed that 70% of the waste collected was plastic that could be recycled, earning the community some money.
Ms. Bhadgaonkar is keen to stress that the project would not have been able to take off without the active participation of the Koli community.
Rivers lost
“There were about 13 or 14 creeks and rivers, like the Oshiwara river, Goregaon creek and Malad creek that over the years just became nallah s with so many people living alongside them,” says Rajhans Tapke, a member of the Koli Jamat Trust. “Slowly all the waste that they generated ended up on the Versova beach, which once used to be the ideal place for fishing. We have tried to clean up the beach before, but now with this project we are trying to clean up the water as well. This work has started late for us but it’s better late than never.”
Mohit Ramle, one of the younger generation Kolis who worked with Bombay 61, says, “Some of our uncles, the older fishermen, tell us that Versova creek was once abundant with a fish called pala that was very popular with Bengalis and you could also find other fish like Bombil and maybe even tiger prawns on the shore.” He says that after conducting the research with Bombay 61, the Koli community plans to take their findings to the maritime board and BMC for funding to put up more nets. “This is the best way we have found to clean up the area.”
Next steps
The next phase in the project is an ambitious plan that uses the collected plastic and fish net sacks to make ring-shaped floating islands, made of plastic, with wood from boat building scrap on top. This is a technology that could be used as closed system aquaculture tanks for fish breeding. This could benefit the community by increasing the fish population in the area and helping them increase their catch.
Before that phase is attempted, however, Bombay 61, along with Urbz, an urban action research platform, based out of Dharavi, plans to hold a four-day workshop toward the end of April to share their findings about the project’s potential. “After analysing the plastic waste that has been collected,” Mr. Bhadgaonkar says, “we are ready to share our findings now with the municipal bodies and to seek their help in moving this forward. We also want more experts to participate and give their ideas, because so far it has only been our ideas and the Koli fishermen’s ideas. We would love to get a water expert or a mangrove conservation expert to come and contribute to the discussion that we have started.”
